Shutter Island: Critic Reviews

The movie does have a payoff, though. And it works, shiveringly well.

Mr. Scorsese's camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp.

At the end of it, I got a whiff of shaggy dog.

I'm of the opinion that DiCaprio is still far too lightweight a performer to carry the grizzled, haunted character that Scorsese is asking him to portray here.

Despite its flaws, Shutter Island is worth seeing for the palpably nightmarish and gothic world conceived by Scorsese.

As Shutter Island proceeds -- mostly as a series of speeches and set pieces -- what is meant to be mysterious and unsettling becomes just plain incomprehensible.

This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese's aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.

Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.

For all the trickiness and bluster, Shutter Island is dead inside.

Not since Raging Bull has Mr. Scorsese so brazenly married brutality to beauty. Not since Kundun has one of his films felt so aspirational.

This is among Scorsese's many gifts: Even when he's not crafting a masterpiece, he reminds you that the movies possess visceral and uncanny powers.

What is real? What is delusion? What is montrous? What is decent? Shutter Island may not shatter the heart but these are gnawing achievements for a movie about madness and paranoia.

"Shutter Island" is not from the Scorsese who stands astride film like a colossus; instead, it's a giddy, gory gift from the Scorsese who sits beside us in the theater, elbowing us at the good bits and taking in the sinister spectacle up on screen.

Shutter Island is a long slog. The sad thing is that Scorsese could have connected emotionally with Lehane's narrative.

Umberto Eco wrote, "Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches move us, because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion." Shutter Island is that reunion, and that shrine.

The film's primary effect is on the senses. Everything is brought together into a disturbing foreshadow of dreadful secrets.

Shutter Island is hysterical, in the clinical and cinematic senses, followed by plodding, just when a potboiling contraption cannot afford to be.

What Scorsese brings to the table, having created more than his share of rascally villains, is a renewed sense of horror and despair at the power of evil.

An unapologetically derivative film full of visual nods that appeal mostly to movie geeks.

Its overripe atmospherics put it in that rare class of failures that can only be made by talented people falling on their face while reaching for the moon.

A movie that keeps you guessing to the end and then -- miraculously -- makes the guessing pay off.

It may not have any of the technological bells and whistles of the latest 3-D offerings, but no movie in recent memory immerses the audience so deeply in its look and feel as the old-fashioned, two-dimensional Shutter Island.

How could this many talented people get so utterly, confoundingly messed up? How could a director considered such an icon make so much money and demonstrate so little control?

Expert, screw-turning narrative filmmaking put at the service of old-dark-madhouse claptrap.

An exquisitely crafted potboiler offering up two and a quarter hours of thrills, chills and Leonardo DiCaprio freaking out in a nuthouse during a hurricane.